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ESRI/SAP – The Benefits of Integration

On 18^th May SAP UK and ESRI (UK) held their first joint event on the business benefits of integrating the two technologies.  The event, attended by over 50 people from 28 different organisations, has highlighted the rapid increase in interest for integrating enterprise systems.

The day started with an excellent keynote from Bart Reynaert from Pidpa, the Belgian water company.  Bart highlighted not only the benefits of linking SAP and ESRI for their water network management, but quanitified the Return on Investment received from doing so.  Pidpa uses their ESRI GIS as the central hub linking all their different systems including various SAP modules, Scada and logisitics.  Bart made it clear that “GIS is the glue between major information systems for all departments”. 

Benefits highlighted by Bart included:

• One central geographical dataset.
• Improved response times for dispatchers.
• Improved customer service.
• Increased efficiency in work pricesses and in data transparency.
• Extended analysis and reporting to support decision making processes.

Pidpa have estimated that linking the systems has saved them 350,000 Euros in just half a year and that is a conservative estimate base on just 1% efficency gains.

The day continued with examples of how British Waterways and Wales and West Utilities had improved their business processes, work flows and efficiencies by integrating ESRI and SAP with a summary showing how integrating enterprise solutions will facilitate the following:

• Reductions in operating costs through efficiency improvements
• Facilitate better decision making through improved analysis and visualisation of data
• Respond more effectively to customers and emergencies through better access to more current information
• Motivate staff through access to the information they need to perform
• Provide the information needed for regulatory reporting

Following the business benefits the day continued in a more technical fashion bringing into the mix the possible integration methods.  Peter Wilkinson of ESRI (UK) went through the issues to be considered including the users SAP environment, the extent of integration required, issues around data integrity and the skills needed to carry out such a project.  Then using webservices and an intenet connection out to the Serco Solution offices in Birmingham, Mark Corbin demonstrated how ESRI and SAP can connect and data edited through the GIS interface or the SAP Gui.

To round off the event Mike Lewis, SAP’s Industry Principal for Utilities and Steve Lead a GIS consultant from ESRI (UK) jointly presented a vision of a spatially enabled enterprise.  From an SAP perspective Mike Lewis outlined the way forward for Enterprise Asset Management focusing on enterprise services and business process examples.  Steve then demonstrated the complementary features within the GIS for network management, financial analysis and inference analysis. 

The following quotes, taken from the event feedback forms give an indication of the value to the event to the delegates:

“Today has highlighted the opportunities with our current Plant Maintenance implementations and the ESRI GIS links we could exploit… Thank you – extremely useful day” Helen Johnson Adams, Business Change Manager, East Sussex County Council.

“First class presentations, many thanks”. Steve Clarke, IS Technical Analyst, National Grid.

“Exellent… well paced and presented… superb demo” Clive Craske, Senior Business Analyst, Southern Water.

“Very interesting – Good functionality beyond just geographic display”.  Duncan Foster, BI Practice Lead, Xansa.